The Mound of Sound

A favourite argument of boosters of Canada’s ‘mission’ to Afghanistan is the one about how much better off the Afghan women are now that the Taliban has been driven out (or at least somewhere down the next block – I hope).

There’s no doubt the Taliban were cruel and oppressive to their country’s women folk. That’s why we deserve a real pat on the back for replacing the Taliban with a free, democratic, enlightened government. We did that, right? Didn’t we?

Maybe not. The democratic Karzai government has now been in power for several years, plenty of time to put Afghanistan back on an even keel as a fitting member of the world community. Whatever good this corrupt administration may be doing, it’s doing precious little for the country’s women.

A front page article in today’s Globe reported that Afghan women, make that girls as young as 13, are getting slung into prison for refusing to submit to arranged marriages. The 13-year old, named Shabano, refused go along with her father’s deal to trade her as a bride for a 50-year old. That’s right, trade, as in livestock. Apparently Shabano’s dad had arranged to trade her for another girl, presumably for his own use.

The Globe reporter managed to visit the women inmates in the luxurious Kandahar prison where they’re kept with their children. A couple are in for real crimes but most are paying the price for the crime of disobedience.

Karzai’s Afghanistan remains a place where tribal law and customs trump the constitution and state law. Women remain the property of their husbands, daughters are mere chattels. And Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying to preserve this way of life?

Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect a predominantly backward, tribal society to embrace democratic values. However if Karzai can’t even establish democratic freedoms at the individual level, what hope has he for success at a national level?

In the meantime, if Harper and O’Conner can’t get Karzai’s gang to act like decent human beings, at least they should stop feeding us this garbage about how “the mission” is making the country a wonderful place for Afghan women. It’s not, they know it and they’re not doing a damned thing about it.

In a note of bitter irony, the report on persecution of Afghan women appeared beside a story about Canada’s latest two soldiers killed over there. It quoted Stephen Harper praising their sacrifice, “to bring stability, democracy and peace in Afghanistan.”

I don’t like Saddam Hussein and I hope he gets what he deserves. I still found it really amusing to read the morning paper’s story that the verdict against Saddam is expected early next month. Wow, I guess we’re going to have to wait with baited breath to discover what that’s going to be. Will he be convicted? Will he be acquitted? Who can tell? The tension is almost unbearable.

Here’s a clue. We are told when to expect the verdict, not by Saddam’s judge or other court official. No, the word came down from the prosecutor. He also told us that sentences will be pronounced “for those found guilty” on the same day as the verdict.

Why the wait? It was obvious what was in store for Sad Man before this show trial even started. Maybe the delay is to let everyone associated with the trial (other than the defendants of course) get all their family members safely out of Iraq before sentence is pronounced.

Saddam isn’t giving up. He issued an open letter to his fellow countrymen yesterday telling them that Iraq’s “liberation is at hand.” I don’t know about Iraq but I think Sad Man’s liberation is just around the corner.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” There’s a whole new meaning to that one according to The New York Times.

Just ask Mary Rosati. She was a novice training to be a nun. Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. For that, her mother superior sacked the young woman. Hmm – what would Jesus do? Rosati sued but the church was held exempt from liability because, well it’s a church, dummy. The paper cites another case, this a rabbi in New Mexico who got unceremoniously booted out the door when he developed Parksinson’s and was, likewise, unable to sue for compensation.

The current U.S. laws are so broad that even operations just remotely affiliated with a religious institution are above the law. In some states, church day cares are exempted from licensing requirements and churches have shown themselves able to avoid zoning laws that would apply to anyone else.

Now the inevitable backlash has begun. Fair is fair, even if it does affect a church.

Most Americans want a system of “single payer” or universal health care along the lines of what we have here in Canada. The polls leave that beyond doubt. Some Americans, however, including the oligarchy that has quietly ousted what used to be a democracy, are determined to see that never happens.

If the people want it and it could be done at less expense than what they’re doing now, why not give them what they want? Well, you see, there’s this one little problem – money. There’s an enormous amount of money driving the current system – money that flows to some enormously profitable outfits like the medical insurers and pharmaceutical industry. These groups are rolling in so much money, they just have to toss a bit of that to the wonderful people who see to it that the gravy train just keeps rolling – the government of the United States, especially those Republicans.

For obvious reasons these health insurers like to keep a low profile. So do most successful burglars. Every now and then, however, we get a glimpse at the wonderful men and women who run this industry, people like Dr. William McGuire.

Bill, as I like to call the old rascal, was the CEO and driving force behind one of America’s two top health care insurers, the UnitedHealth Group. Bill, as I like to call him, got the boot yesterday over a scandal concerning his stock options. You see Bill, as he’s known at the club, seems to have gotten a lot of these stock options backdated.

Backdating is, in effect, playing with the notional date at which stock options are granted. If the stock value plummets to a low of $1 on the 1st of October, for example, and the option is backdated to then, you can later exercise that option to buy your shares at that bottom price. If the share value at the time you exercise your option has hit the roof, it’s a lot like winning the lottery – just without the risk.

Now Bill, as his friends refer to him, stood to make well over a billion dollars on the stock option thing. That caused some upset investors to have UnitedHealth hire an independent law firm to look into the whole thing. Their findings weren’t too good for Bill, as we in the yachting circles have come to know him.

The disgraced Dr. William McGuire (who’s “Bill” anyway?) has been forced to resign and his stock options have been revalued from lowest values to highest values which really cuts into the profits. I don’t know how this guy is going to make it. According to the New York Times, all Dr. McGuire has to show for his 13-years at UnitedHealth are salary, bonuses, buyouts and stock options now slashed to a mere $522 million.

But it’s not just the guys at the top who are getting screwed by these health insurers. Sometimes the little people get it too. There are people like the Shaeffers of Murietta, California. their 4-year old daughter was diagnosed with a potentially fatal tumor in her jaw. The Shaeffers’ insurer Blue Cross, after paying 20,000 for her treatments, cut off the Shaeffers’ coverage. They blamed the parents for failing to disclose a bump on their daughter’s chin at the time they applied for coverage. It doesn’t matter that no one, including the Shaeffers’ family doctor, thought anything was amiss. For all anybody knows the little girl didn’t actually have a tumor at the time of the application. Blue Cross doesn’t care. Now the parents are looking at how to pay the remaining $60,000 of their daughter’s medical bills.

Okay, the Shaeffers and all the others who get shafted by their insurers are real sob stories. But wait a minute. It’s not like they lost half a billion dollars of bogus stock options, is it?

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose has done her best over the past eight months to keep a low profile. Oh, she’s mumbled a lot of vague assurances that she’s doing something about the environment, alluded to a basket of initiatives she’s got in the works and muttered about lengthy consultations to come over the next year. Nora’s even been heard to acknowledge the link between greenhouse gases and global warming. What she hasn’t shown us is whether any of this really matters to her or to her boss, Little Stevie.

We know that Stevie doesn’t like Kyoto, that he badmouths it a lot and never passes up an opportunity to misrepresent what it’s all about. We know that Stevie and his environmental underling, that little hottie, like the notion of deflecting the global warming issue by diverting attention to their smog initiative. We know they also hype the ideas of voluntary compliance and ‘intensity-based’ regulation.

Still, it’s anything but easy to put a finger on just exactly what Ms. Ambrose has been doing since she was appointed. I suppose like all new ministers Mona’s spent the necessary time getting briefed by all the experts and top dogs in her ministry. I mean, they all do that, right? Maybe not.

According to a story in today’s Hill Times, Ms. Ambrose hasn’t bothered to get a briefing from her department on the science of climate change. HT spoke with an unnamed official of her department who said Ronnie hadn’t been briefed by here ministry’s scientists who specialize in this area, adding, “It’s shocking, isn’t it?”

Schocking? Not really. It’s only shocking if you didn’t notice the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the great Athabaska Tar Sands. Rampaging tar sands development and greenhouse gas concerns don’t really fit too well. I mean, how can you make any serious effort to curb emissions of greenhouse gases and ignore the tar sands problem? Wait – okay, I get it. Now I understand why she has ducked those briefings.

How to say this? It’s about drinking and sex. And consent. And whether a woman who gets drunk should even be allowed to consent to have sex. And whether an equally drunk guy can tell the difference. And, well, you know…

Britain’s Solicitor General Mike O’Brien wants to introduce laws that make it easier to get rape convictions against men who deliberately get women tipsy in order to have it off with them.

According to a story in the Daily Mail:

“Under the new plans, the legal definition of consent could be rewritten to make clear that women who are drunk could not have agreed to sex.

“It raises the possibility that even if a woman agreed to sex while drunk, a jury could decide she was too inebriated to give meaningful consent.

“This places a heavy burden of responsibility on men to ensure that a woman is fully conscious of her actions and has agreed to make love.”

You know how bartenders or even friends can sometimes take a guy’s keys if he’s loaded and unsafe to drive? Maybe they’ll have to start putting drunk women in cabs for the guy’s own good too.

Liverpool apparently has a serious “Yob” problem. Yobs or Yobbos are hooligans, street punks and Liverpool has formed a Yob-Squad, officially known as the “Anti-Social Behaviour Task Force” to clean up the streets. One approach being considered by the ASBTF is to use the same aerial drones employed by British forces in Iraq to monitor parts of the city with Yob issues.

The Daily Mail describes how this task force will operate:

“Powers open to them include the seizure of cars being driven without insurance, scrambler bikes being driven anti-socially, property gained illegally and the eviction of families who behave anti-socially or criminally, as well as pushing further the use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders.”

Networks of closed circuit cameras, aerial reconnaisance drones, what’s next?

From time to time I’m going to share some of the gutbusting wisdom that appears in The Globe & Mail editorials. I’m calling this the “toolbox” in honour of that complete tool, Marcus Gee.

After exploring whether 400,000 Iraqis or 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since America invaded, we got this gem: